The GPRS, UMTS, and LTE systems are an evolution of the global system for mobile communications (GSM) standards to provide packet switched data services to GSM mobile stations. Packet-switched data services are used for transmitting chunks of data or for data transfers of an intermittent or bursty nature. Typical applications for Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) packet service include Internet browsing, wireless e-mail, video streaming, and credit card processing, etc. used by human users.
Wireless spectrum is a finite resource. As human civilization is becoming more mobile, the wireless mode of communication is taking a more prominent role for ever increasing types of applications and devices. Another major evolution in the nature of communications is that almost everything is communicated as data over an Internet Protocol (IP) network. The IP Protocol was originally designed for fixed wired networks. The IP Protocol does not handle mobility and as such needs assistance when the point of attachment for an IP endpoint changes. Thus voice, video or documents are all represented in form of IP packets. There are a multitude of applications for setup and management of these sessions. But unlike wired networks, the resources are allocated to communicating entities while they are active. Thus resources are allocated and taken away for a given IP flow several times during its lifetime.
Moreover, subscription characteristics, time and place of use, policies, encapsulation etc. form a valuable set of metadata that govern how such IP flows should be setup and managed in a mobile network. As a result the network nodes that have been designed to handle mobile data flows are inherently more complicated than their fixed network counterparts, routers and switches. For example nodes such as gateway GPRS support nodes (GGSN) and serving and packet data gateways (S/P-GW) in 3GPP networks, are built on router platforms or incorporate the routing functions but are much more complex and expensive.
Furthermore such nodes are rigidly dimensioned and it is very difficult to bring any flexibility in how the mobile gateways are connected to the external networks. FIG. 1 shows a traditional mobile network 100 where computing resources and call processing are statically tied to respective nodes. In other words, extra computing capacity at a Home Location Register (HLR) is of no use to an overloaded serving GPRS support node (SGSN).
Another important aspect of a mobile network is that the logical association between the user and the Internet goes through many nodes and as such the IP packet generated by a user application is encapsulated in different protocols between different nodes. As mentioned above such encapsulation is required to make the IP protocol work when the point of attachment for IP endpoints changes as user moves through the mobile network. In a third generation (3G) network the user plane is encapsulated in GPRS Tunneling Protocols (GTP) between radio network controller (RNC) and the SGSN and again in another GTP tunnel from SGSN to GGSN. The fourth generation (4G) network follows a similar mechanism between evolved node B (eNB) and serving gateway (S-GW) and between a serving gateway (S-GW) and a packet data network gateway (P-GW).
In fact, in recent years there has been significant progress in virtualization of computing and networking in fixed networks which allows for much higher efficiency in usage of computing resources and in terms of elastic allocation of resources (both in computing and bandwidth). Both open source and commercial hypervisors allow virtualization and flexible use of computing resources. Similarly, OpenFlow capable physical routers/switches and OpenVswitch allow flexible use of networking capabilities.
Unfortunately, neither OpenFlow nor OpenVswitch or any other such initiative for that matter, provide a mechanism to handle the metadata required for proper operation of mobile flows. This disclosure illustrates a system and method to specifically handle such data in the context of virtual and flexible networking.